In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into a shallow inlet in Southern California and named it the Bay of Smokes. San Pedro Bay was a soft mudflat, and in 1834 Richard Henry Dana Jr. described ships anchoring miles out or running aground on purpose. Phineas Banning built the area’s first railroad to Los Angeles in 1868 and in 1871 dredged a 10-foot channel to Wilmington. In the 1890s Free Harbor Fight, Collis P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific Railroad backed a private port at Santa Monica, finishing the Long Wharf in 1893, while Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and Senator Stephen White pushed for a public harbor at San Pedro. San Pedro won in 1897, construction of a two-mile breakwater began in 1899 using Catalina Island granite dropped from trains on wooden trestles over the sea, and the area was annexed to Los Angeles in 1909.

By the 1920s Los Angeles had passed San Francisco as the West Coast’s busiest port, and Terminal Island’s canneries, including StarKist and the Van Camp Seafood Company, drew Croatian, Portuguese and Japanese workers. About 3,000 Japanese Americans lived there by 1940; after Pearl Harbor they were given 48 hours to leave, and the community was bulldozed for shipyards that employed over 90,000 people in World War II. In 1959 Matson’s Hawaiian Merchant delivered just 20 containers; the port now handles about 9 to 10 million TEUs and over $333 billion in cargo a year. During the pandemic up to 109 container ships waited offshore, and a 2022 World Bank and IHS Markit ranking placed Los Angeles and Long Beach among the world’s least efficient ports, citing automation and union protections.

• The Japanese community on Terminal Island had homes, businesses and a martial arts dojo, and today only a small memorial remains.
• The main channel was dredged to 53 feet in 2012, and new cranes installed by 2024 serve ships carrying 18,000 containers.
• Air pollution tied to port traffic has been linked to over 3,500 premature deaths a year in Southern California.
• The San Pedro Bay Ports clean air program cut diesel particulate matter 72 percent and sulfur oxides 93 percent by 2016, with ships plugging into shore power since 2004.
• Environment California sued in 2024 alleging over 2,000 Clean Water Act violations, and the port settled in April 2025 for $1.3 million plus penalties.